1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electric musical instrument, and more particularly to an electric musical instrument such as an electric violin in which a tone generating source such as strings is driven by a driving member such as a bow to carry out musical performance.
2. Prior Art
Conventionally, there have been provided several types of electric violin in which vibration of strings produced by a rubbing or twanging action with a bow is detected with a pickup embedded in a bridge, and a musical tone signal is generated from the detected signal. There has been also provided another type of electric violin which is constructed such that a microphone is arranged in a resonating belly that constitutes a main body of the violin, and an electric signal output from the microphone is subjected to some processing to be output as a musical tone signal.
The conventional electric violins as described above are constructed such that vibration of strings produced by a rubbing action with the bow is detected via the bridge by the pickup, or vibration due to resonance of the resonating belly is detected by the microphone. Thus, the vibration detected by the pickup or the microphone is not vibration of the strings themselves, but vibration after being subjected to a filtering action effected by the bridge and the resonating belly. As a result, musical tones generated from the detected vibration are slow in rise time, and have higher harmonic components cut off. This leads to a problem that a player finds it difficult to achieve rich and diverse expressions as he or she intends to exhibit in musical performance. This problem is not limited to rubbed string instruments such as a violin, but common to all electric musical instruments, including wind instruments and percussion instruments, in which musical tones are generated by an interaction of a tone generating source (strings, pad, mouth-piece or the like) with a driving member (bow, stick, reed or the like) for driving the same.